Unlike Paris, in Prague it was difficult to get hold of the right medication at the time it was most needed. This meant Eva was increasingly confined to their bedroom and the employment of Laure even more necessary.

It had been hot, hot, hot that summer.

Most nights, Eva crashed around the apartment kitchen in the attempt to produce a meal. She drank heavily. ‘For the love of Marx…’ ‘Marx’ was pronounced with ultra sarcasm. ‘…Let me have some relief.’ She went early to bed leaving him, as often as not, with Laure.

Those had been moments of calm interspersed between the bitter episodes of mania and depression where Eva tried to make it work and apologized for what she had become. Those times, he found it unbearable to listen as she struggled to explain what it felt like to battle with inner disintegration.

‘It is as if there is nothing of me. Nothing in me.’

‘I’ve let you down.’

‘I’m afraid.’

He was always frightened the children would hear and did his utmost to shield them. The return to Prague had been particularly dreadful. Prague’s golem had taken Eva by the throat and the gains that had been made in Paris were wiped out.

‘I should die.’

She said that quite often when she came round from the bad patches.

That time – that particular time – they had been in the bathroom getting ready for bed.

‘Don’t, Eva.’

Her eyes slid this way and that and he knew something was threatening. Every instinct told him to get her out of there. Too late, Eva took up his razor from the shelf and was out the door.

Hoping to God the children were asleep, he chased her back into the bedroom. She was standing by the window, her right hand holding the razor poised over her left wrist. At his entrance, she turned. Her face was as white as the sheets, the circles under her eyes violet, the body under the nightdress thickened by the drug regimes.

‘I hate myself.’

‘If you don’t care about me, think of Jan and Maria.’

Eva wasn’t listening to him. Nor had she for a long time. Or to anyone else. Whatever was in her – the demon – had kidnapped her thoughts, her mind, her feelings.

He tensed. Ready.

She sprang towards the door. He lunged at her, wrestled her onto the bed and held her down.

Eve cried out, ‘Stop!’

He gripped her wrists and she writhed and beat her heels into the mattress. Her hands were slippery but so were his and he failed to get a sustained grip. The hand holding the razor slid from his. She raised it, bringing it slicing down onto his forearm.